Week 14: Extraordinary Claims...

This week’s reading: Borgmann, Part 3

I had planned to use this final post to address Kellner’s criticism of Borgmann, but I can’t bring myself to. I agree with Kellner on many points, but – now that I’ve read Borgmann’s final section – it feels much more important to engage with Borgmann directly. Briefly, I think Kellner errs in finding Borgmann’s argument theological, but Kellner is correct insofar as he critiques Borgmann for arguing from bias rather than fact.

Borgmann errs frequently and badly in describing the vistas of virtual reality. Where Borgmann is factually wrong – as in his critique of computer photorealism on page 198 – his attitudes reflect a pervasive and unjustified pessimism about the power of technology, and where he is factually correct he draws judgments about technological information that are not grounded in those facts. His treatment of virtual information strikes a strange poise between encyclopedic surface knowledge and deeper ignorance. Part 3 of “Holding On to Reality” reads like a nuanced and valuable discussion of the social context and aesthetic forms of the popular music of the latter half of the twentieth century, only to conclude with a cantankerous dismissal of kids these days and their rock and roll music. Consider, for example, Borgmann’s striking statement that the virtual ambiguity of MUDs “renders virtual reality trivial, and, when pressed for its promise of engagement, evaporates” (p. 190). This implicitly moral judgment is preceded by a careful objective examination of the information environment of MUDs, but not by any grounds for condemnation, and the same is true of Borgmann’s subsequent writing off of online relationships as mere “virtual vacuity” (p. 190). Similar argumentative structure is echoed throughout Part 3. Borgmann relies on intuition rather than evidence to make his broadest points, and while such bald assertions may be effective when preaching to the choir, they are less so when trying to convince an undecided audience such as myself. His proclamations about the loss of intelligence, thing, and context in the virtual environment, even if true, repeatedly made me wonder aloud, “So what?”

Borgmann does not get around to answering that big question – “so what?” – until his conclusion, where he starkly warns, “The preternaturally bright and controllable quality of cyberspace makes real things look poor and recalcitrant by comparison” (p. 216). This is precisely my own worry about information technology – the reason I have felt sympathetic to Borgmann throughout the reading. But his final bases for this assertion, like the dreariness of science fiction novels and the basic seductibility of human beings, are themselves not obvious and are certainly not grounded in Borgmann’s study. Indeed, in some areas, from art to war, virtual information sometimes seems to have given reality a heft that previous generations did not always have the chance to acknowledge. Reading the final pages of the book gave me the same sinking feeling one experiences when one’s favorite sports team commits basic errors of play, or when a normally eloquent advocate of one’s own political view stumbles badly in an important debate. If the central question of “Holding On to Reality” is whether it is worse to experience information virtually than to experience it through nature or culture, and the book represents the best argument that can be made in favor of the answer “Yes,” I can hardly blame society if it answers “No.”

With all that said, Borgmann succeeds in making me want to engage more with reality, even if he fails in convincing me to promote this engagement as a cultural rule. And some of his closing ideas, like his worry that the “sheer disorganized and imposing mass” (p. 230) of hyperinformation will guarantee its future loss, have profound resonance for information architects. In a world where people’s preferred way of engaging with information seems likely to remain irremediably virtual, information architects have the momentous task of preserving that imposing mass of virtual information in a usable form. If, because of the nature of the information or its environment, we aren’t able to situate that information in a reality beyond the virtual, I don’t think that makes us contemptible; our mission is merely to organize, present, and expedite. But if we are able – if we can encourage our users to relate deeply to the information they’re gathering – then we will certainly have done our society and our users a subtle service.

Week 10: Civilizational architecture

This week’s reading: Burnett & Marshall, Chapters 2-4

This week’s reading discussed some of the identity and civilizational issues surrounding the Web. Though the discussion bore only tangential relevance to information architecture, IA is an important cog in the massive machine of the Internet, and as members of this “cybernetic” system, it behooves us as architects to understand how our society uses this machine – and how the machine is changing society.

The great strength of Web Theory thus far is its ability to recognize and examine facets of the Internet that are so obvious to its users that we’ve long since stopped noticing them. One can’t critically think about a social force one takes for granted. I was struck especially by the discussion of the “network society” – a succinct and precise description of a system where “geographical connections that are no longer grounded in physical communities but are connected through the flows of information weaken the patterns of the formerly spatially constructed communities and societies” (p. 41). I grew up in Florida, but I also grew up on the Internet – and you can see which stomping ground shaped my social life more when you know that my best friends live in New York, San Francisco, Charlotte, and Edmonton, not in Fort Myers.

The authors of Web Theory, moreover, are right to predict that the many-to-many communication facilitated by the Internet means that I have “weak tie” social links to a great diversity of acquaintances who I might never know in real life. My Web acquaintances span races and classes, and include homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgendered people, Muslims, Mormons, and Wiccans, world citizens from Austria to Australia, vegetarians, furries, and at least one person who knows vastly more than I do about any topic you can name. Correspondingly, I don’t feel the exclusive loyalty to my home community, alma mater, or local sports teams that my parents did (though I’ll cop to being a St. Petersburg Times fanboy). I’ve largely replaced identification based on where I live or where I grew up with identification based on my interests and identity.

And as for identity, I found Burnett and Marshall’s treatment of negative and positive effects of the Internet on the lives of its users to be amusing and full of truths. The “opposing” viewpoints they presented reminded me of nothing so much as the parable of the blind men and the elephant from a previous reading. It’s quite true, as Kraut in particular suggests, that some people use the Internet in a way that interferes with local social circles – and also true, as he speculates, that this use can cause feelings of alienation and anonymity. But it’s also true, as Pew found, that the Internet can strengthen our connections with friends and family. If Nie and Erbing find that Internet use results in “spending less time with or on the phone with family and friends” (p. 66), this could be because, as Pew says, Net users “have used e-mail to enrich their important relationships” (p. 67).

It’s tempting for Net businesses to seek ways to capitalize on the ability of the new generation of users to form communities that exist outside of physical geography. Indeed, many have done so with varying success; Facebook’s valuation as of July appeared to stand somewhere between $12 billion and $24 billion. Certainly information architects trying to make their case to skeptical executives should be able, in some contexts, to argue in terms of Internet users’ propensity for constructing and broadcasting their identities using Web tools, as well as some users’ desire to be citizens of an Internet community. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with information architects arguing in those terms, or that a company errs morally when it encourages brand loyalty and community-building among its customers. Like many immersive media, however, the Internet certainly can have an addictive and anti-social effect on those who use it uncritically, and online communities like those of World of Warcraft and 4chan play a contributory part in these cases. A solution to this real problem is outside the immediate scope of the reading, but the more we can understand about the nature of the online medium, the better equipped we will be to understand our ethical responsibilities as producers and consumers of Internet content.